How to Pick a Money-Making Blog Topic

We’ve all heard of bloggers who pull down six-figure incomes. It sounds great: work at home writing about some arcane topic from time to time while living a life of leisure. Yet, if you don’t know the secrets of making money from blogging, you’ll find that after all of your Facebook friends have read your blog, your visitors will dwindle to a trickle, your click through rate will be terrible, and your earnings per week from your Google ads will be nickels or dimes if you are lucky. The rule of thumb for website earnings is a tenth of a cent per visitor. This means to make a measly ten bucks, you need a thousand visitors. The problem is, you don’t have thousands of Facebook friends to hassle to read your blog every day..

Given this dilemma, most people think the solution is to get more visitors by publicizing their site, or using search engine optimization techniques, etc. That is all fine and good, but that alone won’t solve the problem unless you are extremely lucky and your blog goes viral or your last name is Kardashian. I submit that the real problem isn’t the traffic, but the measly ad click-through rate. If you use my techniques, you can multiply your per-visitor click-through rate by a hundred or more. Now we are talking! I’ve discovered these secrets from simple trial and error over the years. It’s not rocket science, and it makes complete sense once you understand them.

The most important factor in making money from your blog is picking the right topic to blog about. No matter how good of a writer you are, no matter how good of a web programmer you are, no matter how many secrets about search engine optimization you know, I guarantee you that your blog about funny cat photos won’t make significant money even if you have thousands of visitors per day.

Here is the reason, and the first secret of making money from blogging: you need to pick a blog topic that is in a field where a significant dollar amount of goods and services are sold. This is key to attracting advertisers, and more importantly, attracting paying customers, to your site.

Let’s take a few examples. Let’s say you have a really great site about funny license plates. Suppose it’s so good that you have thousands of visitors per day. You’ll find your click through rate and payout per click to be dismal because there are no goods or services associated with license plates (other than getting plates at the DMV, which has no need to advertise because you have to do it by law).

But you say, cars are associated with license plates, right? Yes, but just because a person goes to see a site about funny license plates does NOT mean they are any more likely to be shopping for a car.

Instead, let’s say you have a site about the best ski resorts in Colorado. Well, there are lots of goods and services associated with that, including ski equipment manufacturers, ski retailers, and the resorts themselves, who might want to advertise on your site. Furthermore, the visitors of your site will be highly likely to click on those ads and therefore advertisers will pay more to be on your site. That translates into gold for you.

So basically, the goal of your site should be to connect paying consumers with advertisers in some lucrative field. You should choose your blog topic with this goal in mind. You need to pick a topic where there are customers willing to pay for some goods or services, and advertisers willing to pay to get those customers.

I read an article about a couple who was raking in money with their blog about home improvement. Well, one reason for that is there are tons of goods and services associated with home improvement. If I’m Home Depot, that is exactly the type of website that would pay a premium to advertise on! Same for Lowes, Black and Decker, Bosch, etc.

So, if you pick the right blog topic, you can multiply your earning per visitor by a hundred or more. Pick the wrong one, and you’ll waste tons of your valuable time and money polishing a turd (in terms of making money that is; there are other reasons to blog besides making money, which might be just as valid!)

Now, we are assuming that your blog or site has good content, the right placement of ads, and many other things that I’ll go over in this site, so stay tuned!

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